booktwo.org

If you’ve not been keeping up, Amazon is making a massive and highly controversial land-grab for POD and the long tail of publishing. More info here. As this is a very big issue indeed, and no worthy body on this side of the pond seems to be making a fuss, I’m only too happy to reprint this statement and appeal from the US Authors’ Guild. Don’t think it won’t happen here.

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of environmental spin on the move, claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that’s another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries’ Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and appears to be quite efficient at its task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It’s a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What’s the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the “long tail” of publishing — the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it’s uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount — or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books — to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors — since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher’s gross revenues — and publishers.

We’re reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon’s bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to legalservices@authorsguild.org.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

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Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild is the [US] nation’s largest society of published book authors.

I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story.

This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing option - Cambridge University Press recently passed the 10,000 title mark (pdf news release) with Lightning Source. Big publishers are increasingly turning to POD to support backlist titles, while new publishers use the technology to bypass the industry’s traditional (and traditionally expensive) high print run, warehousing and return mechanisms (and yes, this is personal: an upcoming project of mine uses POD extensively - and not BookSurge).

Have no doubt that POD is only going to grow. 50% of all books printed are never read - that figure, coupled with the growth of ebooks (another potential monopoly for Amazon), ensures that POD will account for the majority of books published at some not-too-distant point in the future. At the moment, there are price and quality issues, but these are rapidly changing.

What Amazon is attempting to do is build a print/bookseller monopoly as POD enters the mainstream. As Amazon is the largest online bookseller, POD publishers are going to have to use BookSurge even if there books are sold in plenty of other places. And using BookSurge involves higher costs, and being locked into Amazon’s crippling discount rates. Some may say it’s time to boycott Amazon, but most won’t have that option.

It’s an incredibly retrograde step. All our recent talk about mass customisation entirely depends on open, independent manufacturing and distribution platforms - the opposite of what Amazon is trying to force on its suppliers. I have to say that we did see this coming, but it doesn’t excuse a clearly monopolistic and unethical action on Amazon’s part. We’ve yet to hear anything in the UK, but we’re going to be watching developments in the US with a keen interest.

UPDATE: I’ve already heard from one POD publsher who has 30,000 books with Lightning Source, and an exclusive contract. Over a third of their sales are through Amazon, so if this happened to them…

UPDATE 2: The same POD publisher has been back in touch, and according to Lightning Source UK, Amazon hasn’t done anything on this side of the pond yet, and they “don’t think” they will, which isn’t terribly reassuring.

UPDATE 3: Teleread’s up with it’s usual high standard of analysis.

UPDATE 29/3/07: In the comments, an anonymous POD publisher says they’ve had the buy-button removed from their Lightning Sourced books by Amazon UK. Anyone else?

I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It’s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I’ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.
—Kurt Vonnegut, in his very last interview (via Iain Tait).

Vonnegut is of course, as ever, spot on. The novel as we understand it today hasn’t been with us very long (Wikipedia has a wonderfully dense page on the subject, I prefer Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as a reasonable birth date), yet it is the point on which all debates about the future of literature turn; specifically, it is what we usually mean when we talk about “the book”.

It’s also what we mean when we discuss the ebook. Take legendary book designer Chip Kidd’s response to the Kindle:

PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept? The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a “thing” in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to. But books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon. [Source]

Well that’s just bullshit, frankly. Books are not born as ‘things’ either, but you can understand a designer of physical things choosing this side to shout about. Many books have already stopped being ‘things’ and migrated to the virtual: Wikipedia, for example. Wikipedia is not a book, but it was, really: it’s form comes from a book, from all encyclopædias, but it has evolved off the page. Likewise many, many STM titles, likewise many journals, likewise much poetry and short fiction. But the novel as object has a stranglehold on our imaginations.

Which is fine. Novels are great. And right now, there is no device which betters the traditional book in delivering it. Except, it saddens me that a designer of Kidd’s stature can’t see that the page is a screen. The uniqueness of the novel lies in that effort, that performance of the reader that Vonnegut talks about, not in a mode of reproduction. Bar a small number of extreme experimentalists (I’m thinking B.S. Johnson, and similar), the physical book has shaped the novel for the last 300 years - we are approaching a point where this will no longer be true. And I think that’s pretty exciting - elitist, performative novel-lover that I am.

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.

There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart - one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.

But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic - and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.

Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me - they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision - they will certainly please more people - and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.

It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.

And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.

UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.

Matt Webb, of Schulze and Webb, gives this explanation, which pretty much nails it:

A book is designed and manufactured… We discover a book, somehow. We wish for it. We select it, maybe out of a possible half dozen alternatives. We purchase it, then show it off. We discuss it, reviewing it if it’s great or if it’s terrible. We might sell it on.

A bookstore on the street, a traditional bookstore, now seems quite inadequate. Or at least, inadequate before they started doing evening book talks, supporting book clubs and having employee recommendations. But inadequate—it’s really only optimised for purchase.

Amazon’s success could be seen less about the convenience of being online, and more about the fact it is present in more of your moments of engagement with a book.

Amazon understand that we live alongside books. We cross paths with them at all of these points. If Amazon can be present in more of those, we like Amazon more, we encounter them more, and they do better.

Anyone want to argue with that? There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in making sure Amazon doesn’t become the next Tesco/Wal-Mart and control every aspect of our lives (The Book Depository’s redesign is a small step in the right direction), but if you want to understand why traditional bookshops are failing, why in response publishers are being squeezed until the juice runs clear, and why Amazon seems to have so effortlessly inserted itself into the world; well, there you go.

This quote comes from a talk on Interaction Design. You can read the whole thing here. It’ll explain the picture at the top, too (which is Matt’s).

Why am I reading blogs and wikis and transcripts about Interaction Design and Planning and hacking (the good kind) so much lately? Well, it’s because I’m no longer involved in the acquisition, manufacture and distribution of books - publishing’s industrial age - and I’m trying to understand how we create, connect to and communicate literature - particularly, without just creating more ads. Book 2.0 is now my day job.

Once again, I point back towards booktwo’s opening statement, which I always re-read when I’m not sure what I’m doing. The need to think clearly and openly about these issues, and break from the past. Lagerfeld’s dictum: “Throw everything away!” I’m not quite going to do that, but I admire the sentiment.

“If some Javanese sorcerer or Native American shaman possesses some precious fragment I need for my own “medicine pouch,” should I sneer & quote Bakunin’s line about stringing up priests with bankers’ guts? or should I remember that anarchy knows no dogma, that Chaos cannot be mapped–& help myself to anything not nailed down?” - Hakim Bey